‘Poor man,’ said Devereaux. ‘He really should have stayed at home.’
Colonel Moreno was overly optimistic. It took two days. In fact, the news was brought by a bush farmer who lived two miles up a track running off the right-hand side of the highway into the jungle.
He said he recalled the noise of a heavy engine growling past his homestead the previous evening and his wife had caught sight of a big and almost new off-road going up the track.
He naturally presumed it must be a government vehicle, since no farmer or trapper would dream of being able to afford such a vehicle. Only when it did not come back by the following night did he trudge down to the main road. There he found a patrol and told them.
The soldiers found the Cherokee. It had made one further mile beyond the farmer’s shack when, trying to push onwards into the rain forest, it had nosed into a gully and stuck at forty-five degrees. Deep furrows showed where the fleeing driver had tried to force his way out of the gully, but his panic had merely made matt
ers worse. It took a crane truck from the city to get the 4x4 out of the hole, turned around and heading for the road.
Colonel Moreno himself came. He surveyed the churned earth, the shattered saplings and torn vines.
‘Trackers,’ he said. ‘Get the dogs. The Cherokee and everything in it to my office. Now.’
But darkness came down; the trackers were simple folk, not able to face the darkness when the spirits of the forest were abroad. They began next morning at dawn and found the quarry by noon.
One of Moreno’s men was with them and had a cellphone. Moreno took the call in his office. Thirty minutes later Kevin McBride walked into Devereaux’s office.
‘They found him. He’s dead.’
Devereaux glanced at his desk calendar. It revealed the date was 27 August.
‘I think you should be there,’ he said.
McBride groaned.
‘It’s a hell of a journey, Paul. All over the bloody Caribbean.’
‘I’ll sanction a company plane. You should be there by the breakfast hour tomorrow. It’s not just I who have to be satisfied this damn business is over for good. Zilic has to believe it too. Go down there, Kevin. Convince us both.’
The man Langley knew only by his code name of Avenger had spotted the track off the main road when he flew over the region in the Piper. It was one of a dozen that left the highway between the river and the capital forty miles to the east. Each track serviced one or two small plantations or farms, then petered out into nothing.
He had not thought to photograph them at the time, saving all his film for the hacienda at El Punto. But he remembered them. And on the flight back with the doomed charter pilot Lawrence he had seen them again.
The one he chose to use was the third from the river. He had a start of half a mile over his pursuers when he slowed in order not to leave visible skid marks, and eased the Cherokee up the track. Round a bend, engine off, he heard the pursuers thunder past.
The drive to the farmstead was easy, first-gear, four-wheel work. After the farm it was all slog. He got the vehicle an extra mile through dense jungle, descended in the darkness, walked ahead, found a gully and crashed it.
He left what he intended the trackers to find and took the rest. It was heavy. The heat, even in the night, was oppressive. The notion that jungles at night are quiet places is a fallacy. They rustle, they croak, they roar. But they do not have spirits.
Using his compass and flashlight he marched west, then south, for about a mile, slashing with one of his machetes to create a kind of path.
After a mile he left the other part of what he intended the pursuers to find and, lightened at last to a small haversack, water bottle, flashlight and second machete, pressed on towards the river bank.
He reached the Commini at dawn, well upstream of the crossing point and ferry. The inflatable air-bed would not have been his crossing of choice but it sufficed. Prone on the navy-blue canvas, he paddled with both hands, withdrawing them from the water when a deadly cottonmouth glided past. The beady, lidless eye gazed at him from a few inches away, but the snake pressed on downstream.
An hour’s paddling and drifting brought him to the Surinam bank. The trusty air-bed was stabbed into oblivion and abandoned. It was mid-morning when the stained, streaked, wet figure, mottled with mosquito bites and hung with leeches, stumbled onto the road back to Parbo.
After five miles a friendly market trader allowed him to ride the cargo of watermelons the last fifty miles to the capital.
Even the kind souls at the Krasnopolsky would have raised an eyebrow at their English businessman turning up in such a state, so he changed in the lock-up store, used a garage washroom and a gas lighter to burn off the leeches and returned to his hotel for a lunch of steak and fries. Plus several bottles of Parbo. Then he slept.
Thirty thousand feet up, the company Lear jet drifted down the eastern seaboard of the USA with Kevin McBride as its only passenger.
‘This,’ he mused, ‘is the kind of transportation I really could force myself to get used to.’
They refuelled at the spook-heaven airbase of Eglin, northern Florida, and again at Barbados. There was a car waiting at San Martin City airfield to bring the CIA man to Colonel Moreno’s secret police headquarters in an oil-palm forest on the outskirts of town.